Rewriting the classics

I've seen Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". I've read Joyce's "Ulysses". I've not seen Disney's "The Lion King". These works all allude to earlier texts - some more explicitly than others. For the reader/viewer some of these works are enriched by knowledge of the original but can stand alone, whereas others almost require pre-knowledge of the original.

In the last few months I've listened to two fairly recent novels that rewrite a classic from a different Point-of-View, sometimes injecting anachronistic concepts -

• "James" by Percival Everett - I've not read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", which remains (in revised ways) controversial. James (Jim) is Huck's slave friend.
• "Julia" by Sandra Newman - this uses much (maybe all?) of Julia's dialogue from "1984". Julia is Winston Smith's girlfriend. By presenting her words in a new, more feminist context, they take on new meanings. This idea (of not changing the original words or action, but letting them take on new interpretations) is used to a greater or lesser extent by other works of this type.

I enjoyed both novels. Knowing the original means that there are spoilers, though the treatments continue to offer surprises. The authors needed to decide how much the original work would be used as a constraint - how closely their book needed to track the events of the original. I suspect that they didn't want to contradict anything in the original - it's better to leave an event out entirely rather than bend it to fit the new plot. The picaresque nature of Twain's work eases Everett's task in this respect. Julia isn't so central a character as Jim, so Newman had more space to work in - more back-story to add. Reviews of "Julia" often comment on the ending, which goes beyond the time-frame of the main body of "1984".

Some of the satisfaction of reading such novels derives from recognising the borrowings from the originals. My memory of the originals is hazy at best. I found myself at times wondering whether details were in these books because they had to be (being in the originals) or whether they were significant additions by the author. Did the original Julia work in Fiction section of the Ministry of Truth or is this a meta-fiction twist? Did Jim really tell Huck that Huck was his son?

I've recently listened to "The Family Chao" by Lan Samantha Chang. It parallels "The Brothers Karamazov" though I only realised that when I read the reviews afterwards. I think it works fine as a stand-alone book. It deals with son/father conflicts in a family of Orientals in the States. I've not read "The Brothers Karamazov", but reading the Wikipedia summary of it I can see how close the parallel is. It's clever - Chang had to find analogues for many features, in the way that Joyce did.